I Love You
by i am a bee
Summary: post-510. "You pull away and stare at him disbelievingly. He's actually said it." EPILOGUE ADDED.
1. Chapter 1

**Justin's POV**

I love you.

You've only been waiting to hear it for the last five years. You thought that you'd imagined every possible situation under which he'd say it. A bomb was never a part of any of them. You pull away and stare at him disbelievingly. He's actually said it. There isn't really anything for you to say. This is a huge deal for him and you don't want to scare him by saying it back. You've said it before and you know that he's understood every single time that you meant it.

I love you, he says again and this time there isn't anything for you to do except kiss him desperately. You've always known that he loves you but for him to have finally admitted it to himself and to you—out loud—is astonishing. It's kind of funny in a sick and twisted way that it only took a bomb for him to do so. You stay like that, wrapped in each other's arms, for a very long time in the midst of all of the wreckage, the emergency personnel milling around you frantically, but less so than they had been earlier. You commit his smell and feel to memory. It's not that you don't remember what he feels and smells like, it's that he suddenly feels and smells differently than he has in all the five years that you have known him.

After a long while, he asks you what you want. Everyone is with Michael at the hospital, he explains, but there isn't a lot that anyone can do there. They're not allowing any visitors.

When you finally pull away, it's to tell him that you want to go home.

When he leads you to the car, he helps you in. You barely notice that he buckles your seatbelt for you. When he walks around the outside of the car to get in the driver's side, you realise that it's the first time he's relinquished his grip on you since he got back. As you drive away from what used to be Babylon—you still can't believe that it's gone because, even though the structure is still there, it will never be the same, never be _Babylon _again—he doesn't ask you where you want to go, to _which _home you want to go, and you're grateful that he understands, at least, that there is only one place you want to be. You do not want to be alone tonight and you're certain that, even if you did, there is no way that he would have let you.

The drive back to the loft is silent. His right hand grips your left in the space between your seats. With your right one, you finger the soft leather of his jacket. You'd insisted on returning the jacket to the paramedic who leant it to you before leaving. No sooner had you handed it over, Brian had shrugged out of his and was wrapping it around you. It smells good. The heady scent of leather and his cologne and his body is soothing.

You drift off a little bit on the drive back to the loft and it isn't until you can feel him loosening his grip on your hand and then pulling you out of the car that you open your eyes. His arm is around your waist, under the jacket and your untucked shirt, as if he is unable to stand the extra distance between your skin. His hand is warm on your back which you can tell is cold as much from the exposed air as a lifetime of poor circulation. You're always cold.

You slump against him during the elevator ride that somehow takes longer than it has ever taken before. You are completely drained and cannot ever remember having been so exhausted in your life. It finally stops in front of the loft door and you get off together. You dig in the pockets of his jacket for his keys, before remembering that he has them. He had to take them to drive.

He guides you inside, taking you to the bathroom and leaving you standing there stupidly as he goes to turn on the shower. It doesn't take long before he and his touch are back. He undresses you slowly, reverently, running his beautiful hands all over your body.

You know what he's doing and you're half-surprised that he doesn't stop to count your toes and fingers. They're all there, you want to tell him, you're not hurt. But you know that he knows this in theory, so you stand there patiently and unmoving and let him take inventory of the scrapes and bruises that are already starting to mark your skin.

When he decides that you are, in fact, going to be just fine, he pulls you to him and grips you as tightly as he did when he first found you. His jeans and shirt are rough against your naked skin and you stay like that until the steam from the shower clouds the air and he tells you that the hot water is going to run out.

You don't argue with him. You're absolutely filthy and cannot wait to wash the smell of a night that you simultaneously never want to think about again but never ever forget from your pores. You work together to undress him and he leads you under the hot spray.

The moisture in the air makes you cough and hack and you are somewhat disgusted by the dirt that is coming out of your lungs. He doesn't say anything, but stands there and rubs your back until you're finished. He stands behind you in the shower and massages your scalp, working the shampoo in your hair into a ridiculous lather. He leaves it in and moves his hands in great looping circles as he washes the dirt and grime from your body. The water circling the drain is sooty and you can't believe the amount of ash that must have been on you. At long last, he tilts your head back into the streaming water and lets the water wash the shampoo from your hair.

His timing is good because you can tell that you are on the last of the hot water. You exit the shower and walk into the towel that he is holding out. You smile when you realise that it's not a clean one. You can smell the scent of his skin and the fragrance of his body wash on it. When you're sufficient dried, he knots it around your hips—which you know from experience is much more difficult to do on another person than it looks—grabbing one off of the floor for himself and takes you by the hand into the bedroom. He leaves you at the foot of the bed and starts rifling through his dresser. He hands you a t-shirt and a pair of his boxers, leaving you to dress yourself. You're relieved—you're tired of being treated like you're going to break.

He's climbed into bed and turned down your side for you in the time that it takes for you to pull on his clothes.

**Brian's POV**

Standing there in your clothes, he looks even younger than usual. Your t-shirt is too wide on his narrow shoulders and he has rolled down the waistband on your boxers so that they look less—but only in comparison—ridiculous on him. His face is quiet and his eyes are wide and tired and blue. You resist the urge to drag him into bed and wait instead. His eyes don't leave your face when he steps up onto the wooden platform surrounding the bed and then right onto the mattress itself as he drops unceremoniously down beside you. You're in the middle of the bed and there are extra feet of wasted space on either side of you but it doesn't really matter right now.

He doesn't tuck himself into you like he usually does. Instead, he turns himself onto his side, worming his cold feet between yours until your legs are alternated one on top of the other from the knee down, so that his face is pressed up against your bare chest and the bottom half of your face is buried into his damp hair. It smells like him from the half-empty bottle of his shampoo you used. It is still in your shower. He left it behind and you never got rid of it, unable to see the point. You knew he'd be back and then you'd just have to buy more.

You can't believe that you said it. You hadn't meant to—certainly hadn't _planned_ on it—but you hadn't been able to find him. The few moments that you'd thought he was dead had stretched into an eternity and what had started out as a possibility had condemned you. You had seen very clearly what your life would be without him in it—not just apart from you but _gone—_and it was like you'd lost a limb. You would have survived but the phantom pain would have lingered and you'd known then as surely as you knew your own name that this was a thing from which you would never fully recover. This is what you were thinking when you were stumbling through the debris inside of Babylon and then you saw him and it was like a freight train had slammed into you because he was more alive and more beautiful than you'd ever thought possible—than you'd ever dared to hope.

You'd had to leave. Michael is your best friend and you love him, too, but Justin was never far from your thoughts and you left the hospital as soon as you knew that he was going to be alright. It was much easier to find him the second time around and then, without warning, he was in your arms and you were telling him all of the things that you never wanted him to hear. You were so fucking scared. Eyes drifted closed against the red and blue flickering lights. You love him. You've known it forever but you never ever wanted to tell him. Words are one thing while they're in your head, it's when they're out in the open that they become quite another. It's the degree of agency that you award them by the act of setting them free—of saying them out loud—that permits them to come back to bite you in the ass.

His eyes are half-closed and you tell him to go to sleep. The last time you saw a clock—which was a _long _time ago—it was well after midnight. He pries his tired red-rimmed eyes open and you can tell from the look on his face that he doesn't want to. He's going to fight it as long as he can. He feels so small and unsubstantial in your arms and you marvel once again at how you have watched him grow. You wonder if he knows that he has long since become the best homosexual that he could be.

Just as his eyelashes flutter closed for the very last time, you whisper it into his hair again. You've already said it twice, you rationalise, you're already fucked and he might not remember it in the morning. I love you.

* * *

**A/N: Just something that's been floating around in my head for awhile. One-shot. A study in second-person narrative.**

**_Queer as Folk _isn't mine, but I love it like it was.  
**


	2. Chapter 2

**Brian's POV**

You are the first one to waken in the morning and you lie there beside him for a very long time as you watch him sleep. The soft morning light is forgiving but he's still more beautiful than anyone should be. You didn't sleep for more than a couple of hours, tossing and turning, wringing the sheets in your hands, unable to accept the reality that he was okay, that he was _alive, _that he wasn't going to slip through your fingers like air. His body is still and you know that there is more than sheer exhaustion responsible. There was never any other possibility of him going anywhere but here and you feel that karma is pleased with the fact that you are together and he is where he is supposed to be once again. Things are always different in the morning and for once you don't resist the urge to curl around his sleeping form. He is warm and solid and the slow rise and fall of his chest reassures you that he is real, that this isn't a dream. He could be anywhere, could be with anyone, but through some stroke of—and you shudder to say it, if only to yourself—divine blessing he is with you. He loves _you_. You realise now that because he is who he is—as good, as pure, and as whole—there must be a reason why he loves you. He is far too _everything _to deserve the bad things, the sinful, damned things that you've been doing your whole life, ever since your mother told you that you were doing them.

You love him. It's the first time that you've freely admitted it to yourself. It's not as big of a deal, in the clarity of a new day, as you would think, as anyone who knows you would think. The ground didn't open up and it mostly certainly hasn't freed you from your _inner pain_. You have loved him almost since you met him, will always love him, and it shames you a little that you almost had to lose him—_again_—before you'd say the words that he's been wordlessly asking you for for years. You never have been very good at denying him the things that he wants.

A beeping fills your ears and for one horrible second you think that you're back in the crumbling mess of Babylon, that he _has_ died and you have lost your mind, that the last few hours have been nothing more than a sick hallucination fed by your indeterminable grief. If that is the case, you think to yourself, you don't want it to stop. Your heart thuds painfully in your chest and you start to panic until you realise that the beeping is not coming from nowhere and everywhere at once, it's coming from behind you, and it is just your alarm clock—you had known that you wouldn't be going into work long ago, as soon as you found out, but had forgotten to turn it off. The horrible screeching noise—you'd turned it to full volume years ago when he'd started sleeping through it and had become accustomed until you no longer noticed that it was almost three times the volume that it had been before you'd met him—wakes him, too, and you tell him you're sorry when you are finally able to make it stop.

He tells you that he wants you and you smile because his hands are at the hem of his t-shirt and you are hovering over him, helping him push it higher, skimming the palms of your hands, the pads of your fingers, ever-so-carefully over the colourful bruises that mar his perfect skin. He doesn't wince when you work it over his surely stiff arms, wouldn't even if you were hurting him, but you know that you are not. He is okay. You kiss the side of his mouth gently and know that this is as much for him, maybe more, than it is for you. He wants to feel alive right now and you are perfectly willing to help him.

His hands cup your face, they stroke your neck and, like you always can, you feel just how much he loves you. It is unconditional in every meaning of the word, his love for you, because you've done many things to him, things that he hates, things that you are not proud of. It's one thing to hurt him—and you know that you _have —_but the thing that you have never been able to do is leave him and that is the reason why you've been cruel to him, you've pushed him and pushed him and done horrible, hateful things until he's had no choice but to do the leaving himself.

You do not want him to leave right now. You know that you're staring but he doesn't seem to notice, maybe he's used to it, and the fact that you are gazing at him with your heart in your eyes doesn't really bother you like it used to. It's nothing new, really. You've done it forever.

He twines his arm around your neck and pulls you into him until you are so close that you can smell the wonderful scent of his skin. He kisses you this time and you can tell that the languid pace you've set is not enough for him when you feel his soft hands touching you, exploiting each and every one of the places that he knows drive you crazy. It's not really what you want but right now you'll do anything for him. So you let yourself arch into his touch against the cooling skin of his chest and your hand drops to the pair of your too-big boxers that are sitting deliciously low on his hips; you fondle him through the thin cotton, you taste his moan in your mouth.

**Justin's POV**

You thought that you'd won when he started rubbing your cock with the flat of his hand. You started to shimmy out of his boxers, lifting your ass and pushing them down your legs but he's not helping you and he's moving much too slowly, not touching you enough. It's amazing the difference that a few hours sleep can make and you suspect from the way that he is acting that he is running on fumes, has probably been up for hours if he has even slept at all.

His eyes are open and focussed, but they're a little empty. They are dark in the shadows that fall across his face, a little flat and a little glassy. He hardly looks like himself and you remember another time when his face was gaunt and the bruises beneath his eyes made him look like he hadn't slept in weeks. His lies were the worst they'd ever been, then, and he'd broken your heart more than any time he'd ever done so before. A chill runs across your body and you feel like you should knock on wood or throw some salt because his check-ups have been clear and there is no reason for you to assume that his long-term prognosis will continue to be anything except good.

His hand has migrated, it's rubbing circles into your stomach—lifting your legs a little higher, touching you where you want to touch him—and you sigh a silent sigh because you know that he is going to need a little direction. You squirm against him and are frankly shocked when you go to rub him with your knee and he pulls back. He obviously requires much more than _a little _direction.

"Please," you rasp into the stubble on the underside of his chin, taking the condom that he has—_finally_— taken from the bowl on the nightstand into your own hand. "_Please_."

His widened eyes, along with the tensing of his body above you, tell you that he now understands. You can't read him, and when he takes the condom from your hand and tears it open with his teeth—it drives you crazy that, for someone who places as much importance on safe sex, he still does that—and you are sure that it is his way of telling you, no, dear, not tonight, I've got a headache. You're disappointed, you think as he flings the empty wrapper away, but you know that he'll make it up to you. And so you're shocked to the point of not understanding when you feel the coolness of the plastic against you and feel him roll it down.

Your brows knit in confusion but you don't say anything when he stops you from moving behind him and grips your hips with his knees instead. He pulls you into him when you make love—there isn't any point in calling it fucking, because it's not fucking at all when he says your name like it's the only one he knows, when he strokes your hair and watches you all the while with a steady, patient gaze. He says it again when he comes in your stroking hand and another time, yet, after you come inside him and drop onto his damp chest, giving the words back to him for the first time since he's said them.

I love you, too. I love you so fucking much.

**Brian's POV **

You have never felt more aware of the fact that nothing is certain and nothing is forever than you are right now.

You are not going to fuck it up again.

You now know the importance that you have it all with him—everything that he has ever wanted—because you will not allow yourself to wake up one day and realise that you have lost him again.

* * *

**A/N: Not mine.**

**So, this was actually unexpected. I never planned to do anything more with this story but in the midst of my writer's block this came to me and I worked on it off and on for about a week before I just gave up and finished it. Apparently, it needed to be said.**

**I really like this story because I feel like there just wasn't enough of a focus on what happens after the bomb and how much it _really_ affects Brian. It doesn't take a lot to see that the things that he realises that night resonate in what other people refer to as his unexplained out of character actions pretty much for the rest of the season.  
**

**So, yeah. I hope that you enjoyed and that you'll drop me a line and let me know what you think :) _en n'importe pas quelle langue. Je les adore tous._  
**


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